SciMDR: Advancing Scientific Multimodal Document Reasoning

Constructing scientific multimodal document reasoning datasets for foundation model training involves an inherent trade-off among scale, faithfulness, and realism. To address this challenge, we introduce the synthesize-and-reground framework, a two-stage pipeline comprising: (1) Claim-Centric QA Synthesis, which generates faithful, isolated QA pairs and reasoning on focused segments, and (2) Document-Scale Regrounding, which programmatically re-embeds these pairs into full-document tasks to ensure realistic complexity. Using this framework, we construct SCIMDR, a large-scale training dataset for cross-modal comprehension, comprising 300K QA pairs with explicit reasoning chains across 20K scientific papers. We further construct SCIMDR-EVAL, an expert-annotated benchmark to evaluate multimodal comprehension within full-length scientific workflows. Experiments demonstrate that models fine-tuned on SCIMDR achieve significant improvements across multiple scientific QA benchmarks (e.g., ChartQA, SPIQA, SCIMDR-EVAL), particularly in those tasks requiring complex document-level reasoning.